I remember this episode in its original run. Gloria's friend, Tammy, has a riddle that nobody can answer. "The riddle" is: A man and his son are in a car crash. The father is killed. At the hospital the surgeon looks at the boy and says "I cannot operate on this boy, he is my son." How is this possible?
Today the answer is obvious - the surgeon is the boy's mother. Everybody I talk to today immediately gets the answer and looks at me as though I am stupid for even asking. In 1972 there were a roomful of us of varying age - from teens to mid 40's - and nobody could get the answer. We had to wait for the show to reveal it. Everybody had a complicated answer straight out of a movie script. That just goes to show you how much things have changed in 40 years.
Now, looking back, I don't think it was so much that nobody could conceive of a woman doctor. Four years before this show aired, in 1968, the rustic TV show "Petticoat Junction" introduced a female doctor, played by June Lockhart, as a regular character. I think what threw people was perhaps that the woman in the riddle was just not somebody that handed out prescriptions and took temperatures, she was actually operating on people AND she had a child. Those two ideas together - a woman in one of the most difficult and demanding jobs around AND being a mother, just was not something people would think of as even a possibility in 1972.
Today the answer is obvious - the surgeon is the boy's mother. Everybody I talk to today immediately gets the answer and looks at me as though I am stupid for even asking. In 1972 there were a roomful of us of varying age - from teens to mid 40's - and nobody could get the answer. We had to wait for the show to reveal it. Everybody had a complicated answer straight out of a movie script. That just goes to show you how much things have changed in 40 years.
Now, looking back, I don't think it was so much that nobody could conceive of a woman doctor. Four years before this show aired, in 1968, the rustic TV show "Petticoat Junction" introduced a female doctor, played by June Lockhart, as a regular character. I think what threw people was perhaps that the woman in the riddle was just not somebody that handed out prescriptions and took temperatures, she was actually operating on people AND she had a child. Those two ideas together - a woman in one of the most difficult and demanding jobs around AND being a mother, just was not something people would think of as even a possibility in 1972.
